Somalia re-invents itself

When UN forces withdrew in March 1995 the outside world forgot about Somalia. But this fragmented country has survived. It has not sunk into the further anarchy some predicted, but has gradually recreated itself from an original blueprint that bears no resemblance to the international community’s clumsy attempts to “invent” a government for Somalia in the 1990s. But the south of the country is still at war, and a peace conference of representatives of the Somali clans is due to begin in Djibouti on 20 April.

The process of restructuring the Somali nation - lost in its irredentist dreams of the 1960s and 1970s, only to disintegrate in the 1980s and 1990s - began even before the Blue Helmets of the United Nations forces in Somalia (Unosom) withdrew in March 1995. The first stage had been the creation of Somaliland in May 1991, at the time considered a daring act of outrageous “secessionism” (1). Unconsciously Somaliland had embarked on the “building block process”, a model familiar to experts on Somalia. The UN was trying, unsuccessfully, to rebuild a unified government for the whole of Somalia, but Somaliland rejected that ambitious and unrealistic project and decided to take matters into its own hands.

The first step came as soon as the war ended with the meeting of the clans (shir) in Berbera in January 1991. The Somali National Movement (SNM), a northern guerrilla movement that had been fighting Siad Barre’s dictatorship for 10 years, had decided to debate the fate of “its” region" without waiting for the situation in Mogadishu to stabilise. Five months later, at a new shir in Burao, the people pressed the SNM leadership to declare independence immediately within the boundaries of former British Somaliland. The initiative did not go down at all well with the UN, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) (which considered the declaration to be in violation or Article 2 of its charter), or the Arab League which was concerned about the territorial integrity of a member state.

Nobody believed in the viability of this “state”, and yet Somaliland survived. The early years (1991-95) were hard. As in the regions of the south, the country was torn apart by struggles in which leaders of the former guerrilla movements manipulated their clan membership to pillage and try to seize any vestige of power. Somaliland managed to wear them down by organising ever-larger clan meetings where civilians (...)

Gérard Prunier is a researcher at the CNRS in Paris and director of the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa

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Translated by Julie Stoker

* Research fellow at the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France

The independence of Somaliland, the former British colony, separate from Italian Somalia, was no more outrageous than that of the former Italian colony of Eritrea in relation to Ethiopia. See “Somaliland, a forgotten country”, Le Monde diplomatique, English Internet edition, October 1997.

"Punt" was the word the sailors of Ancient Egypt used to describe the Somali coast.

Intergovernmental Authority on Development, a regional organisation set up in 1992 and made up of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti.